Largest Known Solar System Discovered

Picture how large Pluto's orbit is around our Sun. Now picture a planet 12 to 15 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting at a distance 140 times wider than that.

This planet, called 2MASS J2126-8140, and its star pair, are part of what astronomers are calling the largest solar system ever discovered, according to BBC.

"We were very surprised to find such a low-mass object so far from its parent star," said Dr. Simon Murphy from the Australian National University. "There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas."

The newly found system is three times wider than the previous widest star-planet pairing discovery. It takes 2MASS J2126-8140 close to a million years to complete a single orbit. For comparison, it only takes Pluto 248 years to orbit our Sun once.

So how was the system discovered? Astronomers were surveying young stars and brown dwarfs in Earth's neighborhood and found the planet-star pair moving together at around 100 light-years away.

"They must not have lived their lives in a very dense environment," said Dr. Murphy. "They are so tenuously bound together that any nearby star would have disrupted their orbit completely."

Could life exist in this solar system or any other part of the universe? It's possible it did at one point, but probably not anymore.

Michael Passalacqua is a freelance writer for IGN. Chat with him about Undertale and the New York Giants on Twitter @mikepass20.